"Actionable data." It is a phrase well on its way to becoming a cliché. But clichés are often founded in truth, and it's true that the essential quest in analytics is finding data that will guide people to useful actions.

Apple’s battery meter offers a lesson in the challenges in delivering such actionable data.

The battery meter on Apple's new Macbook Pro included an indicator of the estimated battery life remaining. If you’re sitting on an airplane hoping to watch a movie or finish your blog post, time remaining is a critical measure and a source of stress. But Apple faced a problem with presenting the time remaining value. According to The Verge, “it fluctuated wildly on Apple’s newest laptops...the ability of modern processors to ramp power up and down in response to different tasks made it harder to generate specific, steady estimates.”

Marco Arment put it in simpler terms: "Apple said the percentage is accurate, but because of the dynamic ways we use the computer, the time remaining indicator couldn’t accurately keep up with what users were doing. Everything we do on the MacBook affects battery life in different ways and not having an accurate indicator is confusing.”

It's an issue of excess precision. Users want to know a precise time-remaining answer, but the fundamental nature of the machine results in a great deal of variance. I first heard about this problem from the excellent Accidental Tech Podcast. During the discussion, John Siracusa suggests an alternative to the problem: a burn-down chart like the kind used in agile software development. Android phones offer something that looks a lot like what he describes.

Siracusa admits that a more detailed visualization of this nature probably isn’t for everyone. It may work for him (and I like it a lot), but not everyone spends their days visualizing data.

It's a classic Goldilocks problem. Too little detail (and too much precision) can be deceptive and difficult for users to understand when the number jumps around. The lonely key metric without context can be inscrutable.

Too much detail, such as in the form of a full-fledged chart, may be more information than the average user wants to know. The predominant feature of the chart, the slope of the trend, isn’t fundamentally what the casual user cares about. They want to know if the battery is going to still have life when they are getting to the exciting final scene in their movie. Data visualizations should not be engineers serving engineers (as I noted when Logi Analytics asked that Fitbit embed a self-service business intelligence dashboard in their apps).

There is a third option available -- a "porridge that's just right." The alternative is to jump straight to solving the user’s problem while still using data. The data or metric itself isn’t the point; the user’s goal is the point. A better solution for Apple might look like this:

When it comes down to it, the problems Apple faces with its battery life estimates aren't so different from the problems we all face in delivering actionable data. The solution can be boiled down to a simple formula: Use the data to solve the problem. Keep the user informed. Give them a smart choice.